Archive for the 'Stress Management' Category

You may have first learned to pray at your mother’s lap. You decided that, in times of trouble, prayer could open up a pathway to explanation and peace. You might have said a prayer before a big test, before the finishing football game of the season, or before showing your parents your report card.

There appears to be a connection between prayer and curative. Medical studies have even concluded that patients who have other people to pray for them tend to fare better than those without such prayer prop up.

Whether it’s a single prayer or a deluge of prayers, it has been said that prayer can move mountains—and that is particularly true when the mountain is incapacitating sickness.

Because of the link between prayer and curative, it is no surprise that a number of doctors recommend prayer and meditation as stress relievers. Prayer forces an individual to take time out, to spend some quiet time alone with one’s thoughts.

Prayer also requires that a person look outward toward a superior Being for strength and support. Prayer can enable an individual to get back focus and concentration so that he or she can better work through problems and therefore experience less stress.

Is it possible to walk away from stress? NO! It is never possible to walk away from stress entirely since stress will always knock at our doors. However, it is possible to manage stress and avoid stressors that cause stress.

Rushing is one of the leading causes of stress. When a person is rushing to get ahead more than likely he or she did not write a list of demands in question, or plan for the future. Most likely, the person failed to draw up a schedule that helps him or her deal with life on life’s demands. If you are trying to avoid stress and stressors, it makes sense to minimize your demands.

If you are handling more than your person allows then you are stressing your body and mind. It also makes sense to write a list of tasks, scheduling them one day at a time.

If you plan and include the everyday of the year, including all your tasks most likely you will fail. Life does not give us the option to plan tomorrow much less a year down the road.

You can remember obviously the day your father took you for your first bicycle ride. It was a crisp autumn day and the sun was shining on your brand new touchy. You remember his hand gently guiding your bike along the road that ran by your apartment building.

You even remember his smile as you began steering your bike on your own. The memory lingers with you as you begin to make preparations for your father’s interment. He had a long illness—cancer—and you knew that the end would be coming soon.

Yet, you now think that nothing could have prepared you for the day when he actually died. While you anticipated a period of sorrow, you failed to realize that you would encounter a great deal of stress as a result of his death.

You may be astonished—even shocked—by the amount of stress you feel. We rarely associate death with stress, yet the death of a loved one is one of the most stressful events that can happen in our lives.

It might have begun with your first spelling test in second grade. Your stomach became nauseous as you tried to recall all the right letters. You might have felt your heart pounding and your knuckles turned white.

Your head might have hurt as you tried in vain to concentrate. When you received a “D grade” on the test, your stress level only intensified. You automatically viewed yourself as a failure.

By the time it came to the SATs, you had been through years of test taking. Yet, when the moment of truth arrived, you found yourself biting the eraser on your pencil ceaselessly.

You found your eyes couldn’t quite focus, and your attention span seemed non-existent. As a result of such reactions, you find yourself taking the SATs again and again, without appreciably improving your score.

There can be little doubt that taking a test is a highly stressful experience, no matter what your age. A test can determine whether you advance to the next grade…whether you’ll graduate from high school…whether you’ll get into college.

Because education is so critical to professional and financial advancement, a test can be either the door to prosperity or the roadblock to success. You have to realize that you’ll always be undergoing some stress when you take a test.

A warrior, just back from the war in Iraq , is haunted by nightmares of bodies on the battleground. A woman keeps replaying in her mind the day that she was cruelly raped. A man has flashbacks of the time that he was beaten by his stepfather.

These incidents are the result of stress and it is a special kind of stress. It is a stress so overwhelming, so irresistible that it is known as post-traumatic stress disorder. The important thing to remember about post-traumatic stress disorder is that it is far more common than one might think.

First brought to the public’s attention following the Vietnam War, post-traumatic stress disorder afflicts everyone from earthquake victims to survivors of kidnapping. Frequently, PTSD, as it is known, it occurs when an individual’s life has been threatened, or the life of someone close to him or her has been jeopardized.

In excess of five million people are believed to be affected by the disorder. There are a number of telltale signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. For instance, an individual might experience continual flashbacks or nightmares.

When stress is controlling you life then a management scheme is required to help you learn coping skills. Coping skills are essential for overcoming obstacles and dealing with problems.

At one point in our life we have all screamed in our head Why me? Well, why you is understandable as long as you do not live a life of why me. If you are living this life, then it is clear that the mental health is upcoming.

Stress and stressors are common. We all have our share of problems and we all have to make decisions that help to eliminate extra doses of stress. When we make good decisions, it often minimizes stress and helps us to live a prolific lifestyle.

On the other hand, when we add problem to problem by avoiding the process of elimination then we are allowing stress to control our lives. If you think you are the only person in the world that is weighed down from time to time, then you might want to listen to your neighbors, friends, and others around you.

Sometimes it seems as if life is a series of losses— the loss of a brother, the loss of a job, the loss of a spouse. You may realize that you need to take time to mourn all of these losses. But what you may not realize is that such losses can also lead to stress—a great deal of it. In order to remain emotionally healthy, you must learn to deal effectively with stress induced by harrowing life events.

Fascinatingly enough, stress can actually be quantified. The Holmes-Rae Social Readjustment Scale assigns point values to the various stressors we can experience in life.

For example, the most stressful event we can encounter is the death of a spouse, which ranks a 100 on the scale. That’s followed by divorce (73), death of a close family member (63), and personal injury or illness (53), marital separation (65), jail term (63).

Even happy events, such as marriage, can rank high on the stress scale. Most of us do not go through life measuring our stress level. However, referring to the scale can be quite informative.

It might have started with a fear attack during your algebra exam in high school. It then might have progressed into depression in college, and postpartum depression after the birth of your first child.

At times, you might have even felt so desperate that you wanted to commit suicide. Or perhaps you have a brother who seems in the grips of full-scale paranoia. No matter how much you try, you just cannot reach him. He’s persuaded that the FBI is watching his every move, and no one can convince him otherwise. You want him to seek professional help, but he is unwilling to do so. Mental sickness can create tremendous stress for a family.

Because the sickness is so misunderstood, there is the problem of the stigma attached to it. You might be ashamed or embarrassed, either by your own mental sickness or that of a close family member or friend.

You may feel as if you are all alone, that no one else could possibly understand what you are going through. Mental sickness routinely creates financial stress for families. Sometimes, overspending is a sign of manic-depressive disorder.